The Pinhole Camera of the Mind

Here's the best way to see an eclipse. Pull off to the side of the road in Oakland and turn your back to the sun. Find a flat surface that is facing our star, perhaps an old VW van with one of those old yellow-on-blue California license plates. Ball up your first and hold it up to the sun, open your hand just enough to let a tiny stream of photons through your fingers. Look at the van: that's the moon passing in front of the sun. Your hand has become a pinhole camera, an astronomical technology.

Make another camera out of a piece of paper, just for fun. Watch the leaves of the trees to understand what's going on in space.

As you stand there, let your enthusiasm spill over to the people walking by in the streets. Explain to two impatient and incredulous kids what you're doing. Watch them get it. Then, a grandfather may come walking down the street with a tiny little girl in a stroller. When he looks askance at these two random people standing in the street with their fists to the sun staring at the back of a van, get out the explanation quickly, so he has time to look at the shadows.

Looking again, he says, "That's deep."

Of course, we didn't mean to watch the peak of the eclipse like that on the side of the road. We tried to do it all proper with the special glasses. We even made it halfway up the Berkeley hills to the Lawrence Hall of Science, where there was a viewing party. But the traffic was so bad, we thought we might miss the celestial main event and we retreated.

Tell you what, though, I can't imagine that people in the hall of science had a better time than my wife and I did on a corner of the flatlands, making it up as we went along. There was such joy in figuring out what to do and in learning that we didn't need anything manufactured for the occasion. All that was required was learning how to see the right way.

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